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To Your New Era
Chapter 32 Part 4: Upstanding Citizen

Chapter 32 Part 4: Upstanding Citizen

“There’s a few F.S.A. cells all over the country here. It’s a hotbed for human trafficking, so it’s no surprise.”

Their tea was now cold in their cup, rocking gently on the uneven floorboards. The wind had picked up since, and the humidity had finally reached a tipping point. Down came the rain, pouring buckets over the tarp that rolled over the edge into the street below.

The sound alone was overwhelming, and Terrence’s voice was soon struggling to jump over the small fire, now battling the elements to keep aflame.

“We sent word from the Geverdian Embassy in Fadaak,” the Queen said. “Have you not found the phone they used during the transmission?”

“Yes, but it was a public phone.”

“A public phone?” Evalyn scoffed. “Here?”

Terrence shrugged, frowning. “Radio works in short distances, but if you need to call outside the country, you need phone lines. And, like you mentioned your Majesty, third parties can track those. Zip, right back to your hideout.”

Terrence stood, grabbing his cup and walking to the hole in the wall. “So, groups started paying whatever technician was desperate enough to come out here to build phone lines and set them up in public places. They’re treated as a universal safe zone.”

With one hand keeping a firm grasp on the flimsy wall, he leaned out of the hole, extending his hand to the tarp’s edge and catching the overflow in his cup.

“Six different groups have used that phone since you sent that message,” Terrence sighed, swishing the contents of his cup clockwise. “Three of them were different F.S.A. cells. Is there anything else? That’s besides the keywords you’ve already given me, obviously.”

“They said it was…something different,” Iris muttered, watching her tea do laps inside her mug as she rocked it back and forth. “And the workers in Fadaak thought it was too risky. Because…um…”

“Because it was drawing too many resources,” Evalyn said, taking over where Iris left off. “Has there been any chatter about something like that? Something irregular?”

“Irregular…” Terrence muttered, massaging his chin.

“Let’s start with what’s regular,” Evalyn offered.

“Yeah…yeah okay. Well, the MO of local F.S.A. is highway robbery. Most of the roads in this country are screwed, unworkable unless you’ve got some heavy off-road capability. That creates bottlenecks. Easy pickings if you’re trying to do the old stick ‘em up.”

Terrence scratched his cheek, the flow of exposition stopping briefly as his thoughts once again clouded his mind. “Irregular,” he muttered. “Their operations are scattered. It’d be hard to pick out one particular thing, but…by the way you two described it, there’s some people against it? It’s getting some pushback?”

Iris nodded, and the water in her mug shifted accordingly. Terrence pursed his lips. “Okay. That’s something I can work with. I think the best thing you to and her Majesty can do right now is boots on the ground work.”

“Door to door?” Evalyn asked, standing up with a groan before waltzing over to her luggage, grabbing the cylindrical leather rifle bag tucked between the handle straps of the briefcase.

“Door to door,” Terrence concurred. “The G.F.P. keeps a close eye on the traffickers. We make sure they know crossing us is bad for business, keeps incentive to kidnap Geverdians down. That means I can give you a list of places to hit.” Terrence finished his tea and placed the mug on the floor. “They’re a skittish bunch, though, but that’s tomorrow’s problem.”

The nightmares now were a thing of routine. Three doors, one imitation of Evalyn as though a bear had mauled her, and one small cave with one meager life dying and reviving over and over.

Iris felt an innate desire to care for the child, the white tufts of hair growing on its head getting longer by the night. But, by her own estimates, the child would live in perpetual agony, a slow and painful hibernation for the next few years.

There was no way to change history, nor did she hold any desire to try. Nestled deep in the mountains, in a cave no humans would ever find her, her only choice was to sleep her immortal sleep. Waking her would only mean she was conscious of the suffering.

So, the more mature rendition of the little girl unfurled herself from her foetal position and stood, turning for the door.

Her Beast waited for her, floating inches above the ground as still as a puppet with fastened joints. They loosened as she approached, and she reached out to caress its blocky snout.

The teeth chattering nearby didn’t get past her, bone gnawing at bone like a rabid dog on the cusp of losing control. The thing watched her, curled up in the corner, nothing left to cower behind but a shallow, weak plea for mercy.

She regarded the thing almost with pity. Almost. What drew her attention that night wasn’t sympathy, but a change in its silhouette.

It was missing an arm. Torn from the torso at its shoulder, a mass of rotted, hanging flesh was all that remained of what used to resemble the sleeve of a blood-soaked trench coat.

The thing seemed to be in no more or less pain than before. The wound wasn’t fresh either, having already aged by what only days submerged in a swamp could achieve. It was festering and infected, and the blood was no longer red.

Iris took a step closer, the snout of the Beast underneath her arm her insurance. Something about the mass of flesh instinctively repelled her eyes, but she stood her ground and observed.

Little else about the thing had changed besides its loss of a limb. Feeble skin hung onto spindly bones. Hair dangled from pores on the scalp.

It was no longer the otherwise perfect rendition of Evalyn she remembered. The mockery of Elliot had long since passed as well. What they meant, what they represented perhaps, remained a mystery.

But the last stand of the undead kept the three remaining doors sealed. So close now, so dominant over the hallway, was Iris’s presence now that she could not see, hear, nor feel anything left that could stop her from breaking through.

Just one more piece.

If only she reached out and grabbed it, maybe she could tear off another arm—

“Please…”

“Please…don’t…”

“You. Don’t. Underst-t-tan…d…”

“You were shaking.”

Evalyn’s face appeared at the edge of her bed, a gentle smile welcoming Iris back to reality. “Is it the mattress?”

It was springy, each movement earning a ghastly squeal from the metal coils inside.

“No,” Iris said, sceptically. “I don’t think so.”

Evalyn pressed her lips together into a small smile. “All right. Do you think you can go to sleep again? We’ve got a lot of walking to do tomorrow.”

Iris dug her face into the pillow, the rain still pounding against the thin walls a reminder of how vulnerable she was. She believed it was by miracle a Spirit hadn’t waltzed into the house and taken her unawares. Terrence insisted there were barriers and repellents in place, but it still didn’t convince her.

Now that she’d waken up with little fatigue to persuade her to sleep again, the Aether’s jeering was louder in her ears than ever. A dull buzz, scratching, gnawing, unperturbed by the flimsy walls that kept the rain at bay.

Evalyn’s hand brushed her fringe from her face. One small action that she felt did more against the Aether than the tarp ever did against the storm.

Stolen novel; please report.

A strike of lightning. It felt so close. Her home wasn’t exactly made of brick and mortar, but somehow, just being cold and tired far away from her own bed was as taxing on her soul as half the jobs she’d ever undertaken.

“Why do I have to be here?” she said, her subconscious croaking the words out of her mouth before she could force them down again like bile.

Evalyn smiled, a note of mischief in the way her lips curled. “You homebody,” she said. “Camping sucks, I know.”

“This isn’t camping,” Iris argued. There was nothing tranquil about it. Rotting stars and storm clouds blocked the stars, and a maelstrom drowned out nature’s silent whispers while distant moans, chips, howls, cries of Spirits meandering a mass graveyard of gravestones five storeys high.

A single Aether lamp, dangled by a dried, tendon-like string, struggled to shine despite the obnoxious abundance of fuel in the air. Orange light fell unevenly across switchboards and telegram machines, too lazy to venture far into the shadows under desks, behind cupboards, or on the other side of Evalyn’s nose.

Half obscured in shadow, there was still life in her mother’s skin, vitality in her hair, warmth in her touch.

“I was dreaming,” she finally said. “It was the same as always, but…that thing in my head that looks like you. It’s getting weaker, and begging me to not go further. It was…missing an arm.”

The same arm, albeit its living counterpart, had dipped into shadow from the bicep down, and Iris’s heart skipped inside her chest.

The same arm, its warm, gentle yet calloused counterpart, took her hand and caressed a thumb over the back of it, reminding her it was still there. Blood still flowed through it.

“Missing an arm? Did you do that?”

Iris shook her head. Evalyn maintained a rhythm in her petting. One, two, three, four. She felt her eyelids weakening as she counted the strokes.

“Maybe it was the Queen’s fault. I can’t say for sure. Maybe we can ask her tomorrow.”

“That’s—”. The words came before she knew what to do with them. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?” Evalyn asked.

“How to talk to her.” The fingers moved across her scalp like a slow march. An army of snails. Maybe ants.

“Oh, well. No one really does,” Evalyn giggled. “She’s the Queen for a reason. I doubt even Al knows half the time. The most…experienced person I can think of is Marie. Experienced, but I can’t tell you if there’s a theory behind it.”

“…how do you do it?” Iris asked. The jittering Aether was fading, no match for the slow, repetitive, familiar vibration of overworked, hardened fingers against her hair and her skin.

“I think I realised quickly that it’s in her nature to care for her kingdom. Knowing that, you can…butter her up, threaten her, bargain with her…. Show her you have value, and she…gives you that respect. She’s a Spirit; she’s fair, at least in that sense.”

“Do we have to be that fair?” Iris mumbled, her eyelids growing heavier by the second. The shadows on Evalyn’s face grew deeper, and she fought to keep them open.

“We do what we can,” Evalyn whispered, leaning in to kiss Iris’s forehead. “But first we have to work hard for ourselves. Just like her Majesty does for her kingdom.”

Breakfast was swifter than usual. Iris nor Evalyn had little in the way of a ritual around the first meal of the day without Elliot, but with little else to eat besides canned rations—or game Terrence had generously offered to less-than-stellar reception—it was over within fifteen minutes.

They left the building early, finding the cracked sidewalk littered with murky puddles deceptively deep. Evalyn, lost in her map, still skipped over the small ones and circumvented the larger pools. Iris, lost in nothing more than her thoughts, was damp up to her socks in no time.

Do we have to be that fair?

It was a line she had rattled off in the hopes of fending off sleep for even a few seconds longer.

The sidewalk dipped into a shadow, moving too fast to be a cloud. Iris craned her neck, and an ocean of feathers greeted her, shimmering in the fresh daylight like iridescent pearls. Purple, pink, azure blues and hints of yellow.

The vague shape whistled over the ruins, closer to a cloud than a creature, until it and its shadow disappeared over the rooftops of the buildings opposite.

“What are we going to do when we find them? Not the F.S.A., the people killing Wizards and Witches,” Iris said, eyes still fixated on the derelict horizon the ceiling of shimmering feathers had disappeared over.

“Whatever we need to do,” Evalyn asked, nose still deep in the crevices of the hand-drawn map. “They’ve been killing people like us. We’ve got no reason to believe they’ll suddenly decide against it when we catch them.”

“So…we kill them,” Iris said, hopping over a puddle while she tried to ignore the bitter taste the words left in her mouth. She had to get used to them.

“Not necessarily, but if they force our hand—”

“But it’s my fault they’re here.”

Iris’s feet came to a stop at the edge of a murky puddle. Blotches of oil, shimmering a thousand different colours, marred its surface. She kept her eyes on her feet, hearing Evalyn finally raise her head from the parchment. The steady rhythm her boots made against the concrete and gravel stopped. And just as well, too.

Iris didn’t feel like moving forward until she had an answer. She was already so many steps ahead of herself, in a different country, pursuing a lead that was only plausible at best.

“They’re angry at what we…what I did. How is it fair to punish them again?”

She could feel her mother’s stare against her scalp, the same portion that felt her calloused fingers’ caress until she fell asleep.

“Are we even…trying to be fair?”

The pool at her feet festered. She wanted to jump in, hope that it was a pit of murky oblivion that she could lose herself in.

“I hope you don’t mind me speaking on your behalf, your Majesty. The Queen…she’s fair in that she stays true to her principles. She won’t try to use you, scam you, betray you. Don’t compare that to some…eye for an eye notion.”

The steps started again, this time in the opposite direction.

They stopped; the toes of a pair of shoes paused on the other side of the filthy puddle.

“That’s how people lose. For us, that means we die. We play the game, and as much as we try, our game has no rules. All right?”

Iris expected as much. The F.S.A. was a dime a dozen to someone like Evalyn. Only by misfortune had they become so entangled with the organisation, snuffed the fire that burnt on something righteous.

And they had to do it once again, now under the cover of a different justification.

“So why are we more valuable than they are?”

The feet turned around and continued their trek.

“I don’t feel like watching you die anytime soon.”

Almost as though there was some semblance of standardisation, each trading outpost the two visited followed a set criteria, the points of which spelt themselves out with each subsequent visit.

One: outposts are situated in places of low foot-traffic. Spirits were few, and the ones Iris did see—besides the ones behind the counter—were small, never larger than a small dog. Even the Aether in the air was weaker. Less Spirits drew less Aether, less Aether attracted less Spirits. Whatever was the progenitor, the chicken or the egg, she couldn’t tell for certain. It was a question better left to someone like Terrence.

Two: like any other business, there was a storefront. Often poorly renovated and living like a parasite in the shell of something that was once a more wholesome establishment. None of the ‘product’ was out for display, leaving it all to Iris’s imagination to fill in the gaps. It was better that way, according to the Queen. Apparently, her imagination would never be twisted enough to craft anything worse than reality.

Three: the industry wasn’t run in a mum and pop small-time retailer fashion. Every outpost was a blip in a greater trading network, whichever gang, syndicate, black company they affiliated with.

The Spirit behind the counter rarely had a particular disdain for the human, merely the same disinterest an industrial farmer had for their livestock. Most stores doubled as shelter for their keepers, and as such, were a museum of scavenged human inventions, broken or otherwise.

“Geverde must be here,” the Queen whispered as Iris asked the all-important question after their fourth visit to an establishment. “The trade is global. Dismantling a single node might be righteous, but hasty. The trade will move somewhere we do not have agents that can reclaim our citizens. It would be a Friday thing to do.”

Iris followed Evalyn into another X scratched into the map with red pencil. Several storeys of decaying brick hung between neighbouring blocks like an injured soldier hoisted on the shoulders of two comrades. The injury itself was a hollow bottom floor, its remains piled in mounds that spilt onto the street like an unsolved jigsaw puzzle, and in its place stood steel pillars, bolted into fresh concrete, haphazardly dug into the ground.

It was the quality of a job undertaken by one Spirit and one pot of low-quality cement. Maybe a pickup truck, if they were lucky.

Iris imagined it all coming down in a great avalanche of concrete and bodies and wondered if the Spirit in charge would care.

What felt like the worthier cause to wring some throats over…

Iris wished she had the same blindsiding conviction the Queen held.

They caught the Spirit, nestled in piles of rubble for walls, stoking the last vestiges of a roast. It was barely smoking by then, but the smell of charred meat it left behind tickled her nostrils and made her feel ill.

The Spirit, a lanky, four-legged twig of a being, given shape by a green, plated exoskeleton abandoned the fire and searched their surroundings. Eventually, they reached out towards a voice box laying a few feet away. The metal box, as though by some invisible twine, skated across the rubble and attached itself to the Spirit.

“C-can I…h-h-help you…?”

An old, broken model.

Evalyn took charge of the investigation, packing up her map and tucking it into her coat.

“Hello, my name is Batrice, I’m a colleague with agent Hotherland of the Geverdian Federal Police.”

The Spirit shifted, turning back to the fire. “N-n-no…Gev-v-verde slaves…I…w-w-would-d-d call…”

“I understand. But we’ve gotten word from the capital that there is a…victim that we believe to be somewhere in the capital. We’d like to look at your books.”

The keeper’s bulbous head, eyes bulging from either side of their face hesitated, but eventually gave a slow, deliberate nod before returning to stoking the fire.

With another leg, they pointed toward a waist-high slab of intact brick pillar, laying flat across relatively undisturbed ground.

Evalyn obliged, walking towards the desk and urging Iris to follow.

The Spirit watched her, one eye following her as she walked, the other remaining on the dying fire.

The desk was sparse save for a few thick books, barely held together by their binding. The pages were stiff and yellow, their blank faces marked with nothing but numbers.

The in and out, buy and sell, supply and demand of the business was all written down, with each new entry cataloguing the sales for the day by numbers, names, gender and price. That, organised into one column, contrasted with the incoming shipments, sorted by projected value.

Iris watched as Evalyn flipped through page after page too fast to take in the information.

Eventually, she stopped, putting the book down.

“Here too,” Evalyn muttered.

“What?” Iris asked.

“You’ll find out soon. I need to ask some questions.”